I was fortunate in that the licensing authorities were just getting into the letter P's as I was applying for my A, so I asked nicely if I could possibly have G4PHL and luckily, I got it! Prior to that my B license was G8UEB which I never liked
Me & my Dad went to Mablethorpe together to take the morse test, Dad went first and passed so the pressure was on. Long, long time ago but I remember being more scared than I'd been for any exam I'd taken at school! The only other lasting memory of Mablethorpe Coastguard Station was that there were hundreds of rabbits, rabbits everywhere!
The problem with learning morse is that once you know it, you cant hear morse without mentally reading it, which ruins war films where more often than not the morse is actually gibberish, or a "whats that Skippy, they're trapped down the mineshaft?" kind of thing
I only have a Yaesu FRG7700 comms rx now. And a cheap 70cm handie - Baofeng UHF radios cost twopence and do everything! Used to enjoy the old Reverend Dobbs G-QRP stuff and also used to do 27mhz CB mods to 10m FM for the lads, I did a board for the Icom ICB1050 that upped the band to 10m and gave you scanning, priority channel, one-touch reset to the calling channel (29.6), auto repeater shift, reverse-repeater, etc. I still have an unconverted ICB1050 somewhere. In those days software development was on glass-windowed PIC chips that you had to erase in a UV exposure box - a very slow process compared to todays arduinos and a serious incentive to write bug-free code first time
Built a 2m to 10m transverter which worked very well, still have it somewhere, & had a lot of fun with various homebrew QRP sets. Enjoyed contest working for a while, 2m & 70cm from local hilltops.
Wrote an RTTY mailbox for our local radio club that lived on my very unreliable Nascom 1 (this was in teh days of the Creed 7B teleprinter), later migrated to a very dependable EACA Colour Genie which I still have somewhere. Did RTTY and CW tranceive programs for the Genie for a while, but there wasnt a huge takeup. Moved on to a CP/M 'Bigboard' and finally had some reliable storage with 8" disk drives! Wrote a CP/M version of the "Cambridge" packet-radio protocol used by the BBC Micro and for years ran a packet-radio BBS GB7PHL and a Fido land-line BBS, but was later reprimanded by the RSGB as I'd interfaced the two with a homebrew box of tricks that emulated both a TNC & Fido client, with transparent messaging between the two. The Packet Radio BBS was unusual in that the caller could QSY the station between two packet channels, 144.650 and 144.675mhz. The RSGB didnt like that either! All the radio & BBS stuff was in Z80 assembler, 'Zeap' on the Nascom, M80 on the CP/M box, ZEN on the Genie, and MASM on the PC if anyone remembers those. Did a morse and RTTY reader for 'Ham Radio Today' mag - no affordable commercial readers back then! It was unusual in that it used a Z80 with no RAM at all, just the internal registers which was a challenge. Having no RAM meant no stack, so subroutine calls were tricky, theres no onboard RAM in a Z80! All good clean fun but seems a very, very long time ago
Cheers
Phil G4PHL
. Now days it seems a little pointless with the reach of 'tin ter net. I'll explain; I'm insulin dependant diabetic so holidays abroad with all the hassle of needles, keeping insulin cool, eating regularly on time etc is a no go. But I'm happy for my wife to travel and see the world. She went to Borneo to see the Orangutan rehabilitation center in the jungle. The lodge had wi-fi so she Skype'd me regularly. She went to Kenya Masi Mara game reserve and Skype'd me regularly from the 'safari hut'. She's also been to Vietnam and Cambodia, same again. In fact the hardest place to Skype from was Cuba. Short haul holidays are easier. Although, she's off for a Nile cruise and excursions to the sites with the middle son next April, not sure if she'll get wi-fi on the boat.
I wanted it in the 80's when I was in college and flying models to get on 53 MHz away from crowds. Never got around to it. Finally did a few years ago. I wanted to play with Autonomous aircraft and thought it was a good idea. I bought a small handheld based on a friends recommendation and sometimes listen in at night. 
